Happy Birthday, Sally Ride! Google Doodles Celebrate the First American Woman in Space

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space as a crew member on NASA's space shuttle Challenger. Sadly, she passed away in 2012, but today would have been her 64th birthday, and Google decided to celebrate this remarkable woman with a series of delightful doodles:

Ride, an accomplished physicist who studied the interaction of X-rays in the interstellar medium, overcame enormous odds to become the first American female astronaut. She was famously asked egregiously sexist questions by the press prior to her first space flight, including "Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?" and "Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?" On the Challenger flight, she was the third woman to ever travel to space, as well as the first woman to use a robotic arm in space and the first person ever to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.

But those weren't the only barriers she broke on that flight; she preferred to keep her personal life private while she was alive, but after her death it also became known that she had a long-term same-sex partner, making her the first known LGBT astronaut ever.